concept frozen zone in category software development

This is an excerpt from Manning's book Agile ALM: Lightweight tools and Agile strategies. Login to get full access to this book.

The duration and the start of the frozen zone vary. Typically, it takes days. If you get good at Agile ALM, you may reduce this time interval to a minimum, but in a 30-day release, having a frozen zone of two days isn’t uncommon.

The frozen zone isn’t the same as a code freeze (see figure 3.5). The code freeze is a short interval at the end of the frozen zone that spans a few hours, such as the last hours of the release or the last afternoon of the release. The code freeze is the slot where no one can commit anything, not even new features or bug fixes. It’s the time where the releasing team creates the final release. But the procedure of creating the release should be the same as creating the continuous versions. The purpose of the code freeze is obvious: to eliminate any changes to the artifacts. Changes made during the last moments of the release dramatically increase the probability that the next (and final) build will be broken. Although you did build the software continuously, no former build took the last (changed) sources, so the last build can fail. Because the release is strictly timeboxed, it’s important not to have any surprises on the last day or get any new bugs later.